Many manufacturing operations involve processing a strip of material. One example is the process of inserting conductive pins into apertures in a planar substrate known as a backplane which is commonly used in electronic equipment for interconnecting two or more printed circuit boards. In practice, the pins are first severed from a pin strip comprised of a plurality of pin members each integral with a continuous spine. The individual pins sheared from the strip are then inserted into the apertures in the backplane. Various machines currently exist for shearing one or more pins from a continuous pin strip while others serve to insert the sheared pins into corresponding apertures in the backplane. In copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 878,903, filed June 6, 1986, in the names of N. R. Basavanhally et al. and assigned to the instant assignee (herein incorporated by reference), there is described a machine which automatically accomplishes both tasks. For a more detailed description of the Basavanhally et al. machine, reference should be had to the above-mentioned co-pending application.
Unfortunately, the Basavanhally et al. machine is only capable of receiving a single pin strip at its input slot. Often it is desirable to insert pins of different height in the same backplane, which requires that separate pin strips, each containing pins of the desired height, be fed sequentially into the input slot of the Basavanhally et al. machine. To change pin strips, each pin strip, after being fed into the input slot on the Basavanhally et al. machine, must be manually removed and replaced with a new one containing pins of a different size. Such manual changeover of pin strips is time consuming and causes production delays.